The "Other" in Second Temple Judaism is a collection of twenty-seven essays written by colleagues and former students of John J. Collins as a tribute to him on occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. As the title of the volume indicates, the "Other" forms the unifying theme of all the essays. This is a felicitous choice, because the issues of Jewish identity in the Second Temple period and how Jewish groups in the land of Israel and the Diaspora defined themselves in relation to (who they considered to be) "Others" have recently become hot topics in scholarship. The essays engage with this theme by addressing a variety of topics pertaining to five broad areas of study to which Collins has devoted much of his scholarly career: (1) The HB and its reception, (2) Wisdom, (3) Apocalypticism, (4) the Dead Sea scrolls, and (5) Jews among Greeks and Romans.

The essays are introduced by Daniel C. Harlow's brief account of Collins' contributions to each of these five areas of study. The first part of the volume comprises of eight essays and deals with the HB and its reception. Joel S. Kaminsky notes how the HB portrays Israel as God's elect over against two categories of the Other: the non-elect and the anti-elect. He goes on to look at the representations of the Other in late biblical, Second Temple and rabbinic literature. Carol Newsom makes use of insights from Emmanuel Levinas and Miroslav Volf to discuss the strategies of exclusion by which biblical texts dismiss foreign kings' claims to sovereignty which, ideologically speaking, is reserved for YHWH alone. Katell Bertholet examines a number of ancient Jewish interpretations of the account of the curse of Canaan in Gen 9 (4Q252, Philo, Wisdom of Solomon, Josephus, Jubilees and Genesis Rabbah) in order to discover how the writings deal with the problem of a son being cursed for the sins of his father. In an analysis of the Nazarite vow described in Num 6, Susan Niditch draws on insights from different models on how the body is used to distinguish the Self from the Other. Susan Ackerman highlights the prominent role in ritual music-making that pre-exilic texts attribute to women. Her discussion demon-strates, however, how biblical texts from the exilic and early post-exilic times progressively marginalise women from their roles as ritual musicians. Timothy H. Lim investigates how the author of Ruth used the title character's spoken Hebrew and the epithet המואביה as ploys to underscore her foreignness. Antonios Finitsis analyses the different strategies of the post-exilic prophets Haggai and (Proto-)Zechariah in fostering the "in-group" identity of the fractured and struggling community of Yehud. The Middle-Irish composition Buile Shuibhne is the subject of Naomi Jacob's essay. She shows that this text is an interesting part of the reception history of Dan 4's story of Nebuchadnezzar's madness.

Part Two of the volume contains five essays on Wisdom and sapiential literature. Karina Martin Hogan looks at the wisdom poem in Bar 3:9-4:4 and notes that the rest of the writing has a more nuanced view of other nations and election than this poem. Shannon Burkes Pinette traces the changes in the perception of Wisdom during the Second Temple period. By comparing the portrayais of Wisdom in Ben Sira and Daniel, Burkes Pinette argues that, in a short span of time, Wisdom became perceived as a distant and mysterious "Other" Matthew Goff argues in favour of the view that Sir 50:25-26 was part of the original composition. These verses are in keeping with Ben Sira's negative attitude towards the non-Judean peoples of Palestine and reflect an anti-Samaritan sentiment. Samuel L. Adams considers the perspectives on wealth and poverty in wisdom texts from the Second Temple period and shows that 4QInstruction affirms wealth as a sign of God's good graces, whereas the Epistle of Enoch does not. In the final essay of Part Two, Daniel J. Harrington examines how Wis 1-6 express hope for transcending death by combining Greek notions of immortality with Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. He also notes that although the NT's views on life after death are thoroughly Christological, some texts nevertheless sound very similar to Wis 1-6.

Part Three on Apocalypticism opens with an essay by Lorenzo DiTommaso in which he explores the epistemology of apocalyptic Otherness, describes its expression and reflects on its contemporary relevance. He dismisses the worldview of apocalypticism as dehumanising and harmful. Sean Freyne examines the interrelatedness of sapiential and apocalyptic motifs and themes in 1 Corinthians, Mark's Gospel and 4QInstruction. Although many people adopt a negative attitude towards apocalypticism, Freyne argues that it is so intricately related to wisdom in these Jewish and Christian writings that it would be historically distorting and hermeneutically short-sighted to attempt to remove the apocalyptic elements in them for the sake of modern sensibilities. George W. E. Nickelsburg surveys passages from 1 Enoch, the Dead Sea scrolls and the Psalms of Solomon and indicates how these texts construe reality in terms of the contrast between the "We" and the "Other." Using contemporary disabilities studies and monster theory, Rebecca Raphael analyses the body imagery in 4 Ezra as an example of how this writing constructs the Other. Part Three of the volume concludes with Daniel C. Harlow's, close reading of the Apocalypse of Abraham, which shows how this writing deals with the prominence of evil in the world, especially in the shape of idolatry.

The Dead Sea scrolls are the theme of Part Four of the Festschrift. Shane Berg builds on Collins's views regarding the history of the Qumran community and the role of the Teacher of Righteousness therein by focusing on religious epistemology. Berg claims that the Teacher was responsible for a shift in the community's religious epistemology from wisdom to a prophetic type of thinking. As a result, inspired exegesis of biblical texts gained in importance as a vehicle for knowledge about and from God. This shift was accompanied by a separatist self-consciousness and communal organisation. James VanderKam revisits the question of who the Wicked Priest (הכוהן הרשע) mentioned in the Habakkuk pesher and Psalms pesher might be. VanderKam argues that the Hasmonean high priest Jonathan qualifies as the most likely candidate. Angelic praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice forms the topic of Eric D. Raymond's contribution. He analyses the blessing that comes at the end of the sixth Sabbath song (4Q403 1 i 28) and concludes that the paradoxical nature of the phrase might have been intended to reflect the strangeness and otherness of words spoken by angels. The essay of Esther Chazon (with Yonatan Miller) demonstrates how an allusion to the unique phrase אם הדרך in Ezekiel 21:26 serves to bolster anti-Samaritan polemic in 4QNarrative and Poetic Compositiona-c(4Q371-373).

In the first essay of the fifth and final section of the volume, Martin Goodman examines the shifting connotations of the (variety of) names used in Roman, Jewish and Christian sources to refer to the Jews during the first two centuries C.E.. The topic of Erich S. Gruen's contribution to the Festschrift is the reciprocal ways in which Greeks understood Jews as philosophers and Jews saw Greek philosophers as dependent on Jewish lore. According to Gruen, this reflects the complex and ambivalent relationship between Jews and (especially, Greek) Gentiles during the Hellenistic period. At the same time, this situation casts a shadow on the idea that Jews regarded Greeks as the "Other." Robert Doran focuses on the account in 2 Maccabees of Antiochus IV Epiphanus' unusual religious persecution of Jews in Jerusalem during the second century B.C.E.. Doran argues that Antiochus did not want to abolish the Jewish religion, but followed in his father's footsteps by not allowing a rebellious city to maintain its own ancestral laws and by imposing new, Greek laws on the city. What Antiochus did not know was that the ancestral laws of Jerusalem which he abolished (circumcision, Sabbath observance and kosher dietary regulations) were considered to be the laws of the one God. Antiochus could therefore not foresee the dire consequences of his actions. The final two essays deal with Jewish writings from Ptolemaic Egypt. Taking issues concerning the identifi-cation of a text as "Jewish" as point of departure, Patricia Ahearne-Kroll looks at Artapanus' claim that Moses was responsible for certain Egyptian cultic practices. Ahearne-Kroll proposes that Artapanus' work must be read in light of the influential polytheistic traditions that Jews encountered in Egypt and, on this basis, argues in favour of the position that Artapanus was Jewish. Robert A. Kugler analyses the legal reasoning in two Heracleopolis politeuma papyri. According to Kugler, the Judeans of Heracleopolis utilised the hybrid Greco-Egyptian law of the Ptolemaic kingdom, but also drew on legal traditions from the Judean ancestry in order to achieve their litigation goals. Kugler's discussion of the papyri points out that these Judeans in Hellenistic Egypt might very well have been conscious of their "otherness" in relation to their non-Jewish neighbours.

On the whole, this is an impressive volume that covers a wide-ranging spectrum of issues relevant to Jewish identity and the construal of the "Other" in the Second Temple period. The contributions will no doubt be of interest to scholars and students working on the history of this period, the multitude of sources pertaining to Second Temple Judaism, identity formation in antiquity and the great variety of views on and of Jews in both Palestine and the Diaspora.

One small point of criticism might, however, be mentioned. Mindful of the fact that this volume is a Festschrift that honours John J. Collins, one would, nevertheless, have expected that at least some of the contributors would engage critically with Collins's publications and perspectives on a given matter. A few of the essays refer to or acknowledge the author's indebtedness to Collins's work, but the honouree's views are nowhere subjected to genuine critical assessment. This is, in my opinion, a drawback of a volume that brings tribute to an esteemed scholar, since, in scholarship, candid criticism can be a more sincere form of flattery than imitation.

This 5,6 kg "baby" was carried by Egyptologist Prof. em. Dr. Kenneth A. Kitchen since the 1950s. He was inspired by the work of G. E. Mendenhall who suggested that 14th/13th century Hittite treaties showed affinities with biblical texts in structure and other features. This led Kitchen to the idea to investigate "the entire field of Near Eastern documentation as known (including the limited Hebrew material)" to find out whether this might "prove a more fruitful area of productive research, yielding useful results" (vol. 1, XX). Thanks to a two-years grant in 2003-2005, Kitchen could recruit Near-Eastern linguist Dr. Paul J. N. Lawrence for this project.

Volume I is the main body of this publication. It contains the whole relevant material of treaties, laws and covenants of the Ancient Near East as far as available (106 items through c. 2500 years). The texts are arranged by their suggested dating, starting in the 3rd millennium B.C.E. down to the mid-late 1st millennium. Each text is introduced by a bibliography wherein the sources, the editions and translations and some secondary literature are documented. The transliteration of the texts is on the left side, the English translation on the right. Lawrence edited the entire Akkadian corpus, Kitchen all the non-Semitic texts plus also Eblaite and Ugaritic. Both of them edited parts of the rest of the West-Semitic material. Two excursuses contain additional material. The most important feature of this edition is that the texts are tagged by Roman numerals which identify 15 structural components like "Title/Preamble," "Prologue," "Stipulations," "Witnesses," "Blessings," "Curses" and so on.

Volume II with the subtitle "Text, Notes and Chromograms" is tripartite. Part 1 contains notes to the individual texts regarding transliteration and translation. Part 2 contains an index of topics appearing in the texts, and several other indexes and lists, for example a statistical list with the prices, fines and tributes to be paid, an index of deities as witnesses and in blessings and curses, and more. Part 3 contains the so called "chromograms," that is colour-diagrams which draw on the Roman numerals in volume 1 and thus illustrate the structures of the texts.

Volume III offers an "overall historical survey," following the chronological arrangement of volume 1 with regard to the different regions in each epoch. Kitchen describes it as "a metahistory through both time and space, in its broader context, as a basic contribution to the long, richly varied story of Near Eastern and East Mediterranean civilizations" (vol. 1, XX). Of course, this metahistory is focused on the relevant background of treaties, laws and covenants.

Biblical scholars, who certainly are the main audience of OTE, will find that within the chronological arrangement of volume 1 the biblical texts are not placed where the majority of scholars date them, but in the time when the story takes place. Thus, Gen 21:22-24; 21:25-33; 26:26-31; 31:44-54 are placed in the early 2nd millennium B.C.E.. Texts of Exodus-Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Josh 24, 1 Sam 18:3-4 and 2 Sam 7:1-17 are placed in the late 2nd millennium. Yet, it is striking that the chromograms of this biblical texts correspond much closer to the chromograms of the other texts of these epochs than to those which date in the time suggested by the majority of biblical scholars. Since the publication of an article by R. Frankena („The Vasall-Treaties of Esarhaddon and the Dating of Deuteronomy," OTS 14 [1965], 122-154), for example, Deuteronomy is held by most scholars as depending on Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty (7th century B.C.E.). However, as can be seen in the chromograms, the structure and the elements of Deuteronomy are similar to the Treaties and Laws from the late 2nd millennium (cf. vol. II, 262-63) but barely similar to the treaties and laws in the first half of the 1st millennium (vol. II, 265). This corresponds to recent suggestions, as, for example, Ch. Koch concludes, "dass die ältere vergleichende Forschung mit ihrer These einer hethitischen Ableitung der Bundestheologie wenigstens partiell im Recht war, insofern die aramäischen Vertragstexte ganz augenscheinlich in einer traditionsgeschichtlichen Verbindungslinie zu den Vasallenverträgen der hethitischen Grossreichszeit stehen" (Vertrag, Treueid und Bund, BZAW 383, Berlin 2008, 316-17). The edition of Kitchen and Lawrence brings back the question of structure and form into the comparative studies of biblical and non-biblical legal material.

Yet, for biblical scholars this edition is not only an invaluable treasure for the structural and form-critical work with biblical and non-biblical material but also for comparative studies of legislation. The index of topics in Volume II helps the exegete to search for certain topics in the whole corpus of legal and treaty literature of the Ancient Near East. Nevertheless, even though this work is very helpful for the work of the biblical scholar, it is not designed for biblical studies especially, as Kitchen writes: "The emphasis was shifted away from centering on simply the biblical documents, and instead onto the entire Ancient Near Eastern corpus as a variegated whole in its own right" (vol. I, XX-XXI). Thus, these three volumes are welcome to everyone who is interested in the Ancient Near Eastern Treaty, Law and Covenant literature.

Due to the high price one will barely acquire this monumental work for the home library, but no institutional library for Ancient Near Eastern or biblical studies should lack it. Its editors deserve high respect and many thanks for giving this useful instrument in our hands.

The book has as its nucleus a series of lectures which the author gave at seminaries and theological schools in Myanmar. Ten essays were also given as lectures at the Adult Sunday School Class of the First Presbyterian Church, Evanston, Ill. The preface clearly spells out the aim with this book. It is written for those who may never look into a Jeremiah commentary. As a result it contains no footnotes, no technical discussions, and few citations of the Hebrew.

The contents of the book consist of a preface, a list of abbreviations, twenty chapters dealing with the book of Jeremiah, a bibliography and a Scripture index. A look at the Scripture index reveals that the author was not able to deal with every chapter in the book of Jeremiah in the same detail. For instance, no reference is made to Jeremiah's visit to the potter's house (Jer 18:1-17). In an endeavour in which an attempt is made to present the contents of the fifty-two chapters of the book of Jeremiah in 140 pages one should however expect that a selection of the material was necessary. That does, nonetheless, not imply that a reader of "Jeremiah among the Prophets" would not get a representative discussion of the material contained in the book of Jeremiah.

The first chapter deals with the prophet's call and commission. Although the author concentrates on Jer 1:4-12, 13-19, he also reflects on Jer 15:16-17, a passage in which one seemingly learns about the prophet's acceptance of his call. Where necessary, the author follows the same modus operandi. For example, in the chapter on Jer 7:1-15, 26:1-24 is also discussed. This modus operandi will definitely help the reader to gain a better understanding of the book of Jeremiah which is well-known for its doublets.

The citation of relevant texts in English ensures that the focus remains on the text. Additional information is, nonetheless, lavishly given. Even though "Jeremiah among the prophets" is not meant to be a commentary, but an "introduction," it provides more information than some commentaries on the book of Jeremiah.

In the final chapter the author gives a brief discussion of the composition of the book of Jeremiah. The colophons in Jer 36:1-8; 45 and 51:59-64 prompts him to propose three editions of the book of Jeremiah. Chapter 52 concludes a fourth and final edition.

"Jeremiah among the prophets" is a welcome addition to the literature on the book of Jeremiah. The author's hope that it will generate further interest in Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophets and the OT as a whole, will in all likelihood be achieved.

John J. Pilch is well-known in the circles of social-scientific NT studies. As visiting professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University, at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Hong Kong and director of research for Cuyamungue: The Felicitas D. Goodman Anthropological Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he currently also lectures in the Odyssey Program at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. He has a host of publications (often with Bruce Malina) on the Middle Eastern cultural world of the Bible (especially NT). This book is more of the same and represents a collection of 15 previously published essays of his, some of which have appeared in journals such as BTB.

The point of departure for Pilch is the fact that the Bible is filled with reports of people having dreams (e.g. Joseph), visions (e.g. Isaiah and other prophets), or taking trips to the sky (John in Rev 4:1-2). According to the texts these were religious experiences in which the agents either encountered God, a divine message or embarked on a celestial journey (Paul in 2 Cor 12:1-2). Pilch sets out to make a plea to the modern scientifically minded believer to consider the possibility that all such experiences involve what he calls ASC's or "Alternate States of Conciousness."

Reading the Bible in a quasi-fundamentalist manner, Pilch offers a perspective on religious experiences in the Bible that, instead of domesticating the text to the modern world, intend to place the text in an alien cultural context where it cannot be touched by modern secularism. Pilch has a problem with biblical scholars who reduce textual reports of revelation to "literary forms" and who are doubtful that an event had occurred in the way the texts describe. In fact, it is personal, and so, as is typical of this genre in conservative social-scientific biblical criticism, the book's argument begins with a moving testimony in which Pilch offers an autobiographical account of what he takes to be an ASC - after his wife died Pilch's mother in law appeared to him in a dream saying she had to go to New York for surgery and asking him for prayers, comfort, and consolation.

Pilch insists that research on over 400 representative cultures in the world reveals that more than ninety percent of these cultures have reported such experiences routinely. Drawing on insights from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology (the non psycho-analytic version), and the social sciences, Pilch then investigates and interprets a selection of OT and NT accounts of dreams, visions, journeys into the heavens, etcetera, within what he believes to be their cultural contexts.

Following an introduction, Part 1 is concerned with "ASC's in the Old Testament." First up is a closer look at "the Nose and Altered States of Consciousness: Tascodrugites and Ezekiel." There is also a discussion of "the Call of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1-3) as an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) Experience" and of "Holy Men and Their Sky Journeys" in the context of a "Cross-Cultural Model." Moving on we find an excursion to the Apocrypha where Pilch focuses on "The Holy Man, Enoch, and His Sky Journeys" and on "Music in Second (Slavonic) Enoch." Part 1 ends with "Flute Players, Death, and Music in the Afterlife (Matt. 9:18-19, 23-26)."

In Part 2 the concern lies with ASCs in the NT. Here the stories of Jesus and Paul are central. Commencing with "Altered States of Consciousness Events in the Synoptics," the arguments roll over to "The Transfiguration of Jesus," as "An Experience of Alternate Reality," "Appearances of the Risen Jesus in Cultural Context" as "Experiences of Alternate Reality," and "The Ascension of Jesus: A Social-Scientific Perspective." Then there is "Paul's Ecstatic Trance Experience near Damascus in Acts of the Apostles," "Paul's Call to Be a Holy Man (Apostle): In His Own Words and in Other Words," and "Paul's Call to Be an Apostle." This section concludes with "Visions in Revelation and Alternate Consciousness: A Perspective from Cultural Anthropology," followed by an Index of Authors and an Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Literature.

I am sorry to say that Pilch's treatment of these topics is logically and ideologically suspect from the start.

Pilch's autobiographical analogy is rather weak since the Bible does not really think of ASC's as involving human family members appearing to each other. Yet Pilch's would like to think that it was the biblical God he happens to believe in (of which most cultures in the world never heard of in the biblical period) who also created us and made us capable of such experiences. Pilch's god has therefore arranged for his very weakened mother-in-law to tell him it was time for us to resume contact. If this god talks to us through dreams and visions, then perhaps our deceased relatives and ancestors can communicate with us this way, too. Whatever one makes of the theistic beliefs, the reasoning here is clearly flawed. As are the appeals to the dreams of composers and musicians to prove modern ASC's in the religious sense - the Bible does not see revelation in dreams as precursor to and catalyst for creative artistic activity.

In order to put forward his case, Pilch's interpretations of biblical passages are creative rather than literary-historically sound. Astonishingly, he simply assumes that the data he is working were meant to be live historical reports. But there is an obvious reason why literary critics deny this. The biblical reports of dreams and visions follow stereotypical genre patterns which form and rhetorical critical analysis can show to be literary constructs as they have to conform to certain structures of composition. If the textual accounts of so-called ASC's were meant to be a copy of actual empirical scenarios they seem quite theatrical and contrived.

Not deterred by the findings of critical biblical scholarship, Pilch latches on to the alterity of biblical religious experiences to claim that text-immanent ontologies do not do justice to it. For Pilch we must, however, be open to the experiences. "If we deny this possibility, we may[sic] be limiting what God can do for us" Yet Pilch never explains why a god should be limited thusly. There is only a constant and fallacious appeal to the majority: "Factual or not," he says, "biblical accounts of alternate consciousness are both plausible and significant because they constitute a very common, real, human experience in their respective cultures."

What Pilch does not realise is that drawing on parallels does nothing to help the apologetic agenda of the book. Data from comparative religion do not warrant a general conclusion. Though people from other cultures may have had similar experiences, the intentional content of those experiences varied greatly in terms of the details across time and space so that there arises what philosophers of religion would call the problem associated with religious pluralism or religious diversity. After all, Pilch's argument can be used to claim that in an ASC an actual god called Zeus did reveal himself to Agamemnon within a dream and Shamash did appear to Gilgamesh, and that none of all these are just literary constructs as modern sceptical scholars seem to suggest.

Not that Pilch himself takes the text seriously in a naive realist fashion. In philosophical terms one can say that for Pilch divine revelation as reported in the biblical texts is not an ontic event but a noetic one, every time linked to some altered state of consciousness and not actually happening outside the mind in front of the person. However, reducing theology to psychology does not exactly inspire confidence in the hermeneutic of the kind of reader Pilch and his social-scientific critics happen to be. Rather than explaining religious experiences in the Bible, by reducing them to alternate states of consciousness Pilch is actually explaining them away.

In the end the book will leave many unanswered questions for all sorts of readers. As for the research itself and all the anthropological data notwithstanding, it is psychologically, philosophically and biblical-exegetically highly suspect. The academic rhetoric hides a conservative agenda behind scientific claims with no direct bearing on the biblical texts they are supposedly linked to. Hence I cannot recommend this book with a good conscience to anyone except as an example of how social-scientific criticism has turned into a platform for protecting the cognitive biases of conservative Christian readers. As the identity of the publishing company (Eerdmans) implies, this book is written for and will appeal to more fringe type evangelical audience. Psycho-analysts can have a field day.